Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

by Earley, Pete

  Jerry loathed his stepfather.

  In the presentence evaluation, Jerry Whitworth described him as an uncaring alcoholic who frequently “physically abused” Bobe. Nearly everyone in Muldrow whom I spoke to agreed that Bill Morton turned nasty when he was drunk. But Jerry’s charge that Bill had beaten Bobe just didn’t seem to ring true. The charge was more a reflection of how much Jerry abhorred his stepfather, I was told, than of Bill Morton’s character.

  Less than a year after the family returned to Muldrow, Jerry ran away from home. He went to his grandparents’ house and slept in the room that he and his mother had shared before she married Bill Morton. The next evening Bobe came to fetch her son. He was delighted, he told a friend later, that his mother had cared enough to come after him, and he agreed to go home with her. But that night Jerry and his stepfather quarreled. Jerry described the altercation to a childhood friend shortly after it happened.

  “I was furious at my stepfather,” Jerry said, “so when my mother took me home, I purposely pretended that he wasn’t there. I was sitting on the sofa, shining my shoes, when he began talking to me, and I ignored him. It really made him angry and he finally began yelling at me. I just kept ignoring him until he got so angry he yelled, ‘Get out of here and don’t come back.’

  “That’s just what I had been waiting for.”

  Jerry lived with his grandparents after that. More than twenty years later, when Jerry and john Walker, Jr., became friends, Jerry talked about how much he hated his stepfather. One evening, while Jerry and John were sailing aboard The Dirty Old Man, Jerry disclosed that he had actually once considered killing Bill Morton.

  Jerry’s confession, John said later, reminded him of how he too, as a boy, had decided to kill his alcoholic father. But John didn’t tell Jerry about that incident. Instead, he listened to Jerry’s disclosure and remembered it, knowing it was the sort of insight that might come in handy later.

  Jerry was not the only relative to seek sanctuary with his grandparents. Beulah Owens Watts, Bobe’s sister, had moved home because of marital problems. Jerry and his cousins, Harold and Arletta, played together constantly during the summer.

  Much of the land in southeastern Oklahoma is too hilly and rocky for farming. ‘But the banks of the Arkansas River are tabletop flat and black as fresh-ground coffee. Through the centuries, the Arkansas has flooded with regularity, creating a lush delta along its banks. In Muldrow, this is called the bottoms.

  Untold tons of cotton, melons, spinach, peas, and greens had been taken from the bottoms by the Owens family, and Jerry was called upon to do his share of the farm work. Once when his cousin Harold announced impetuously that he hated farming, Papa Owens quietly replied, “Harold, what is there but farming?” It was more a statement than a question.

  The only day of the week when Jerry and Harold escaped farm work was on Saturday, when they rode with Beulah to Fort Smith, Arkansas, some ten miles away. While she shopped, they went to the movies. Jerry planned these excursions with precision so he and Harold could see up to four movies in one day by racing from theater to theater.

  At dusk, the boys would grudgingly retire to the West End Drug Store, where they would wait at the soda fountain for Aunt Beulah. Sipping ten-cent cherry cokes, Jerry and Harold would critique each movie.

  “Movies became an escape for me as a child,” Jerry told a friend years later. “I learned that there was a much bigger world out there than the farm and Muldrow.”

  By the time Jerry was a teenager, Bobe and Bill Morton had two young daughters of their own named Regina and Donna Jean. Because Jerry didn’t live at home, it was difficult for him to maintain a relationship with his half sisters, but he and Regina became good friends even though she was nine years younger than he. He didn’t get along well with Donna Jean, the younger girl, however, and as she grew older, he avoided the house more and more.

  Jerry had plenty of money as a teenager. The source wasn’t Papa and Mama Owens, or the summer jobs that Jerry held. The money came from his uncle, Willard Owens, who supplied Jerry nearly every Friday night with a twenty-dollar bill. Uncle Willard was fifteen years older than Jerry, but he treated him more like a younger brother.

  “I don’t think anyone loved that boy more than I did,” Willard Owens recalled later when I met him.

  Owens was considered a rogue by Muldrow standards. He was a freethinker – some said “radical” – who argued with nearly everyone, spent his money as quickly as he earned it, and was married three times.

  Jerry adored his uncle. In his presentence evaluation he said Uncle Willard had a major influence on him during his childhood. It was his uncle who encouraged Jerry to question, rather than blindly follow, his schoolteachers and the local Baptist preacher. It was Uncle Willard who challenged him to read and get better marks in school. And it was his uncle who convinced Jerry during his senior year in 1957 to give junior college a try after graduation rather than become a farmer as Papa Owens wished.

  Jerry didn’t want to disappoint his favorite uncle, so after he graduated, he immediately took a summer job on a highway construction crew to earn his college tuition. Several days of heavy rains, however, kept the construction crew idle, and Jerry found himself pacing the floor at the Owenses’ farmhouse.

  The daily downpours also kept Papa Owens housebound, and one afternoon Jerry overheard his grandpa grumbling about Uncle Willard’s fast-paced life. The next morning, Papa Owens and Jerry argued.

  For the first time in his life, Jerry spoke back to his grandfather. “It’s none of your business how I spend my money or how Uncle Willard spends his,” the seventeen-year-old boy stammered.

  A few hours after he and his grandfather argued, Jerry caught a ride into Fort Smith and joined the Navy. The next day, he left for boot camp at Hunters Point, San Francisco. It was only the second time in his life that he had been away from home, but Jerry didn’t feel comfortable anymore living at the Owenses’.

  Chapter 23

  After a few months at sea, most single young sailors have something other than sightseeing tours on their minds when they reach a foreign port. Not Jerry Whitworth. He was a supply clerk on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Bon Homme Richard when he went to sea in 1957 for the first time, and when he heard that the carrier was stopping at Osaka, Japan, for liberty, he rushed to the ship’s small library and checked out as many books as he could about the Far East.

  Working as carefully as when he had planned his Saturday movie outings with cousin Harold, Jerry spent hours scrutinizing the tour guides and mapping a detailed itinerary.

  Among the books that he read was The World of Suzie Wong, a romantic tale about a destitute English painter who falls in love with and. marries Suzie, an illiterate Hong Kong prostitute with a heart of gold. Mesmerized by the story, Jerry chattered endlessly about Suzie Wong.

  When it was time to go ashore, Jerry’s shipmates cajoled him into joining them for a few drinks before he set off on a tour. They whisked Jerry to a bar, got him drunk, and took him to a whorehouse. When Jerry emerged the next afternoon, he told his friends that the illicit experience had been one of the most glorious moments in his life. He had met a wonderful oriental prostitute, just like Suzie Wong, who, he was certain, had felt something special toward him.

  It didn’t take Jerry long before he realized he was not worldly, so he asked two friends on the carrier to teach him how to dress fashionably, what kind of drinks to order at bars, and how to bargain with hookers.

  “Jerry was very influenced by other people,” recalled Roger Olson, who became Jerry’s closest friend in the Navy.

  Jerry and Roger had met when assigned to the same barracks at boot camp. It hadn’t taken either man long to spill his life story. When Jerry mentioned that his father owned a bar, the Blue Moon Cafe, somewhere in California, Roger pressed him for details. Jerry wasn’t certain, but he thought the town’s name began with the letter M. Roger began reciting names: Madera, Malibu, Maxwell, Mendocino, Monterey, Men
dota.

  “Wait, I think that last one is it,” said Jerry. “Mendota?” asked Roger. “I think so.”

  They dialed information and asked if there was a Blue Moon Cafe listed in Mendota.

  Yes, the operator replied. A Johnnie Whitworth was also listed in the directory.

  “I told Jerry that my parents lived in Dos Palos, which was only twenty-three miles north of Mendota,” Roger Olson recalled, “and I suggested that he go home with me that very weekend so we could drive down to find his father.”

  Jerry telephoned the Blue Moon Cafe when he and Roger arrived in Mendota, just to make certain his father was there. When he and Roger walked through the cafe’s door, Juanita Whitworth recognized Jerry instantly.

  “You must be Jerry,” she said. “I’m Juanita, Johnnie’s wife.”

  Juanita’s recognizing Jerry bewildered Roger Olson. “I couldn’t figure it out because she had never met Jerry, but when I met Jerry’s father, I knew immediately what had happened. Jerry was the absolute spitting image of his father.”

  Jerry and his father visited for several hours, and on the way back to Dos Palos, Jerry’s spirits were high.

  “I don’t think he minded me being around,” Jerry told Roger. “Did you notice that he introduced me to several customers as his son?”

  Nearly every free weekend after that, Jerry and Roger drove to Dos Palos. Jerry would leave early each Saturday morning for Mendota, where he helped his father run the combination cafe-bar. He would return on Sunday to spend a few hours with Roger and his parents, and then the two sailors would drive back to camp. Roger’s mom and dad, Dave and Addie Olson, soon began calling Jerry their “adopted son.”

  Jerry shocked his Uncle Willard and other members of the Owens clan when he returned to Muldrow for the first time after joining the Navy. Uncle Willard had sent Jerry money for the bus ticket home. What surprised Uncle Willard was Jerry’s new attitude toward Johnnie Whitworth, and also Bobe.

  “Jerry was really impressed with his daddy,” Willard Owens told me, “and he was angry with his mother. No one in Muldrow had told Jerry that Bobe was pregnant before she was married, and when Jerry started spending time with his father, well, he found out. Johnnie told him and it really upset him.”

  Jerry’s best friend in Muldrow, Geneva Green, also recalled that Jerry was upset during his first visit back.

  “It really bothered him that his mother had been pregnant before they married, and when I asked him why, he said, ‘I’m a bastard. Don’t you understand, Geneva? She didn’t want me either!’ “

  Jerry was discharged from the Navy in August 1960 and moved in with his father. Johnnie was opening another cafe in a nearby town, and he wanted Jerry to manage it, but Jerry couldn’t decide. His pal Roger Olson had also been discharged and was going to a California junior college in Coalinga. Roger wanted Jerry to attend school with him.

  Jerry took several months trying to make up his mind and his father finally had no choice but to withdraw his offer and put one of his wife’s cousins in charge of the new cafe. After that, Jerry left for Coalinga.

  In the beginning, Jerry said he was going to become an engineer, but he later switched his college major to philosophy. He changed to geology after that, and then finally decided on economics. His latest dream, he told Roger, was to teach college economics in Hong Kong.

  Roger graduated from junior college and transferred to a four-year school a few months after Jerry arrived. Once Roger left, Jerry’s interest in academics waned, and in June 1963, he abandoned college and reenlisted for two years. This time, the Navy sent him to a supply center in the Los Alamitos Naval Air Station near Long Beach, California. There he met an unorthodox sailor named Windsor Murdock, who both intimidated and intrigued him.

  “He is one of the most intelligent men that I have ever met,” Jerry told Roger Olson in awe. “He can be anything that he wants to be. I mean, he is a totally unique individual.”

  Shortly after Jerry met Windsor, Uncle Willard telephoned with the tragic news that Jerry’s half sister, Regina, was dying of cancer at the age of sixteen.

  “Regina had been a star basketball player just like her mother,” Geneva Green later told me, “and one day, I think it was her Aunt Beulah who noticed that Regina was limping during a game. Well, they took Regina to the doctor and he found out she had cancer, and in a day or two she took sick and died.

  “Jerry came to see me after Regina died,” Geneva continued. “I was asleep when he knocked on the door, and when I let him in I could tell that he had been crying because his eyes were an red. He sat down and told me that he had been in the woods, alone, sitting and thinking. He told me that he had prayed and prayed to God to save Regina before she died. He told me he had told God that he would do anything if He would save Regina and not let her die. And then after she died, Jerry said he just couldn’t believe in God anymore.

  “I remember exactly what he said. ‘Geneva,’ he said, ‘if God can let that happen to a good person like Regina, I just can’t believe in Him. Why would He let someone like her be hurt and let her die?’ ”

  Willard Owens recalled a similar conversation with Jerry. “He took Regina’s death really hard. Jerry is a sensitive boy, and he told me that after Regina died, he became an atheist.”

  When Jerry returned to work after the funeral, Windsor Murdock knew that the problem was more than grief.

  “Have you ever read Atlas Shrugged?” he asked. “No,” said Jerry. “You should,” said Windsor. “It’ll change your life.”

  The next day Jerry bought a copy of the Ayn Rand novel. The book and Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism were a revelation to him. He soon had read all of Rand’s books and began sending them to Geneva Green and Roger Olson.

  Like an evangelical Christian anxious to save souls, Jerry bubbled with Ayn Rand fervor. For him, the murky mysteries of life were now crystal clear. There was no God, Jerry explained to Roger. God was the creation of man, an intellectual brace. Ayn Rand had reached that conclusion, just as he had!

  All the weight that Papa and Mama Owens had placed on his shoulders as a child by dragging him to Pentecostal services suddenly was lifted. Logic and reason were the answers, not some primitive belief in a higher authority. Windsor Murdock had shown Jerry the way.

  In June 1965, Jerry was honorably discharged from the Navy and went to work as a night manager at a fast food restaurant. He had intended to return to college, but went back to Muldrow instead when a buddy of Uncle Willard’s offered him a job.

  Jerry lasted three months in Muldrow before deciding that he no longer fit in. He was convinced that the U.S. economic system was about to collapse and the country was about to enter another Great Depression. Townsfolk who had considered Uncle Willard radical now looked upon Jerry as fanatical.

  He was lonely.

  This time, he reenlisted for a six-year tour in order to qualify for vocational training.

  No one in Muldrow was surprised when he left.

  Chapter 24

  Jerry wanted to learn electronics, but in May 1967, the Navy sent him to his third choice of schools – the radioman’s school in Bainbridge, Maryland, and from there, for advanced training to the Naval Training Center in San Diego, where he would return three years later as an instructor.

  Once again, Jerry was lonely.

  One night, he read a newspaper advertisement that said a lecture about objectivism was being held at a local hall. He arrived just as a petite woman was walking into the building.

  “She really turned me on, and I decided I was going to get a date with her,” Jerry said later.

  He sat near her and made a point of speaking with her after the talk.

  Lynn–Evelyn–Woodhouse, nineteen, was immediately smitten by Jerry. At twenty-eight, he seemed so much more worldly and refined than her teenage friends.

  He asked her to go with him to another lecture on objectivism that was to take place in Hollywood in a few days. Three weeks later, Jerry
asked Lynn to move in with him. She refused but announced that she would marry him if he asked. He proposed, and they were married on September 21, 1967.

  “It was a mismatch that no one understood,” recalled Geneva Green. “Jerry brought Lynn back to Muldrow to show her off and we were all stunned.”

  Even Uncle Willard found the marriage between his gangly nephew and his child bride peculiar.

  “She was a real nut,” Willard Owens recalled. “She was skinny and small, and she didn’t have much to say. We tried to make her welcome, of course, but she still acted strange. During the night, she got up and just took off. No one knew it until morning, not even Jerry. Imagine, a young girl in a strange town getting out of bed at night and going off on her own without even telling her husband or anyone else that she was leaving. No one knew where she went or what she did. She just came walking in the next morning as if nothing had happened.”

  Willard Owens wondered if Jerry’s new bride hadn’t been out during the night seeking male companionship, but when he suggested that, Jerry became enraged.

  Later, Jerry told both his Uncle Willard and Roger Olson that he and Lynn had experienced sexual problems that had left Lynn frustrated and unsatisfied.

  In July 1968, Jerry was assigned to the U.S.S. Arlington, which was sent to Vietnam. A few weeks after Jerry left California, he received what he later described to friends as a “Dear john” letter from Lynn. She had found someone else and was divorcing him.

  “Jerry was very hurt by Lynn. He loved her very, very much,” recalled Roger Olson. “It crushed Jerry. Jerry didn’t like to lose anyone who was important to him as a friend.”